


Four Times Patrick Almost Bumped into Rachel in Schitt’s Creek (and One Time He Did)

by fairmanor



Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: 4+1 Things, 4x07, Angst, Angst With a (Sort-of) Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Closure, Coda, Episode s04e07 The Barbecue, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Patrick needs to use his words, Post-4x07, Reconciliation, The Barbecue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-24
Updated: 2020-06-24
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:22:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24896878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairmanor/pseuds/fairmanor
Summary: An imagining of all the other times Patrick could have met Rachel in Schitt's Creek in 4x07, The Barbecue.
Relationships: David Rose & Rachel, Patrick Brewer/David Rose, Patrick Brewer/Rachel
Comments: 10
Kudos: 81





	Four Times Patrick Almost Bumped into Rachel in Schitt’s Creek (and One Time He Did)

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! Apologies if I made any continuity errors/impossible situations in this fic; if so, it'll be because I didn't watch the episode closely enough, lol. I know we only see Rachel in the motel in this episode, but I think it’s safe to assume that she might have had a snoop around the town, even popped into a few shops…

1\. Ten Forty-Two A.M. outside Rosebud Motel

10.42am

**David Rose**

Okay I know you literally just left but like,,,can u pls get me a muffin from the café

Plsplsplsplsls

**Patrick Brewer**

Breakfast has literally just ended, David. In fact, some people are probably still having it.

**David Rose**

I HAVENT EEATEN IN TWO HOURS

and that was a shitty piece of toast

well that and the cookie

so like

can you just get me a munfin

**Patrick Brewer**

*…*

**David Rose**

…I can see you typing

**Patrick Brewer**

*Muffin

**David Rose**

LITTLE BITCH. DON’T COME BACK

*

Patrick smiled as he locked his phone and put it in his back pocket. When he had the time, often before he went to bed, he liked to scroll right to the top of his and David’s text chain and read all the way down. It made him feel a little giddy, having a private map of their relationship. The way David had gone from curt, punctuated _okays_ and _no problems_ to shameless keyboard smashes and midnight ramblings via voice notes about multivitamins and Andy Warhol and the blanket he was currently under was like looking at a slow, soft unravelling of David’s heart, if Patrick dared believe he owned such a thing.

He would always get sidetracked whenever he received a text from David whilst out. More than once it had taken Patrick wandering to the motel, just to drink in some portion of David's existence as though he had no object permanence and needed to cement the concept of David Rose in his long-term memory. Today was one of those days.

He was thinking about how the motel probably needed a lick of paint (and wondering which of the rooms was David’s, where all his things were, hoping the fragments of his rich, beautiful life were tucked away safely) when he saw it.

There was something about the way the person who had just pulled up to the motel got out of the car that felt like a Louisville slugger to the gut. Something about the way they hauled their bag up onto their shoulder, the careful slam of the door, even the sound of the car locking…

Then they were gone. They hadn’t seen him, and he could barely see them – especially not anymore with the plume of dust that had just rolled up in the passing of a truck. As soon as the truck passed, the motel door closed and the person was gone, like some seedy magician’s final trick.

Patrick tapped his back pocket. Town hall. Before he forgot.

2\. Twelve-Eleven P.M. in Café Tropical

‘Somebody should probably be at the store anyway, huh?’

Patrick gave David a playful slap as he left, thankful he had a moment to himself without having to listen to any more about the barbecue. He wasn’t _annoyed_ about David not telling him, per se, but it did set off the little twinge of uncertainty that Patrick had seen reflected in David’s eyes so often before. It made him wonder if he and David were on the same page about all this. Granted, it was a small town; sooner or later he was sure he would have been, as Moira put it, _corralled_ into something resembling a family gathering. This was different, though. They had invited him. He was being let into the little patch of grass and splintered white wood that Patrick had been staring at this morning.

The one that had left him feeling so uneasy.

While wrapped up in his thoughts, Patrick passed by the Café and realised that he’d forgotten to get David’s muffin. He wasn’t even sure if David wanted one anymore, but it was something to do.

He approached the serving bar and Twyla smiled at him brightly.

‘Chocolate muffin to go please, Twyla,’ Patrick said.

‘Sure thing – oh, that reminds me! Someone was asking after you, like, five minutes ago,’ Twyla said.

He wondered how that could have possibly reminded Twyla, but had quickly learned not to question her trains of thought lest he be sucked into some mildly disturbing story for the next twenty minutes.

‘Oh? Who was it?’

‘I don’t know, some girl. She came up and asked if I knew where she could find a Patrick around here, but it got pretty hectic so I didn’t really have time to answer.’

Patrick frowned, the sickliness of the morning returning. It wasn’t quite the Louisville slugger it had been. More of a 29-inch Barnett.

‘Did you ask for her name?’ Patrick asked.

Twyla looked innocently blank. ‘Why would I do that?’ she said. Then she hit a palm to her forehead. ‘Oh, so I could’ve– darn it! Sorry, Patrick. I guess if you know her, she’ll get in touch eventually.’

Patrick paid for the muffin and crossed the road. His mind was lit up with the faces of unhappy business consultees and ghosted Tinder dates. The midday heat made him feel like his shirt and jeans were stuck under his skin; he shifted and fussed on the way back to Rose Apothecary, feeling oddly like he was half an inch outside his body as he sat behind the till.

3\. Three P.M. in Rose Apothecary

If Patrick had been having any doubts about David genuinely hating the cookie, the indulgent grin on his boyfriend’s face as he pecked at it for the rest of the day had quelled them immediately. That, and the lingering crumbs on his lip that Patrick found himself leaning far too close towards at inappropriate times during their work hours.

After David came back, Patrick’s stomach relaxed a little. Now he knew they’d be in the same place until the evening, he was able to chug through the familiar motions of their workday in peace. He gave himself some time to sort through the stockroom a little too thoroughly, settling into a mindless routine of aligning bottles of body milk and counting the tins of organic powdered shampoo just to hear David’s voice as he interacted with customers or yelled at Alexis down the phone or sung under his breath. It was weird, really: David knew he was there, obviously, but Patrick still felt like he was peering into a tiny window of the vast museum that was David Rose, existing and content with that all by himself. Patrick could listen to him for days. Years.

But after the clock hit three, commemorated by a single beep on his watch that always made that noise at the top of the hour (and the one that David had threatened to throw out on more than one occasion), Patrick found himself coming out of the stockroom, something behind his ribs fluttering uncomfortably. He undid his top button and rubbed his damp palms on his jeans.

‘Who was that?’ he said, a little too forcefully.

David looked up, blinking. He held up his phone hesitantly. ‘Um. I’m…texting Stevie?’

‘No, not that.’ Patrick pointed at the door. ‘That customer, the last one who came in.’

David looked at the door just as indifferently. He’d clearly not thought about serving them. Another customer, unremarkable and forgettable, much like the rest of the conveyor belt of shoppers that Patrick had grown immune to since the start of his career in retail.

‘I don’t know, I don’t really remember her.’

Patrick assumed it had been a ‘her’. It was something about the voice. Something that felt like simmering and, absurdly, a little like coming home. Like coming home soaked to the skin with snow after playing hockey for far too long and realising that your dad hadn’t lit the fire. You had to light it yourself.

‘I’m never good at finding these things,’ she had said. _Who else hadn’t been good at that?_ Patrick wondered. Anyone in the world, surely. Could’ve been Patrick himself. He had always prided himself on being no-nonsense and down-to-business, but if he’d learned anything recently it was that he could be a lot more clueless than he thought. And that he could be completely and utterly ruined by the right combination of messy black hair and Givenchy sweaters.

‘Why, are you expecting someone?’ David said. There was an edge to it that Patrick had learned to soothe with some well-placed reassurances.

He forced a smile. ‘No, no. I just thought I recognised the voice, that was all.’

Patrick looked at his watch and felt his heart sink a little. He was, officially, having an off day. He couldn’t wait to lock up the store and relax with David’s family. No matter how many times David had tried to convince him that he’d be driven away in minutes, Patrick had begun to lean into the once-terrifying thought that he didn’t want to be anywhere that David wasn’t.

4\. Five-Nineteen P.M. in Patrick’s Bedroom

5.19pm

**Patrick Brewer**

I didn’t respond because I was busy, Rachel.

**Rachel Arden**

I just want a moment to talk to you. That’s all

Can we call

**Patrick Brewer**

I can’t right now, I’m sorry. Can we just put a pause on texting for a bit? I have a lot going on and I really can’t deal with this on top of it.

**Rachel Arden**

*…*

*…*

*…*

Patrick stared at the little message bubble as it appeared and reappeared, the movement of the dots embarrassingly reminiscent of the way his own fingers would drum on the surfaces of things when he was nervous. They were doing it now, tapping the back of the chair in his room at Ray’s as he dealt with another unsolicited correspondence with his ex-fiancée.

Patrick felt cold. Cold within himself. Guilty. This wasn’t him. He didn’t shut out people he’d known his whole life, he didn’t throw the sand of his neat, ordered livelihood into the eyes of the friends and family he loved, he didn’t…

_Is that what I’ve done?_

_And for what?_

It was a curious mix of emotion, this one. It weighed on his chest in a sickly, foreign pain. The regret of what he’d left behind and the yearning for what he had found, a sordid balancing act that had begun to eat him up from the inside. Before he had left his hometown, he was convinced he’d never felt much outside the realms of it, as though he didn’t exist outside its contexts. Everyone around him had been none the wiser to his discomfort, and he had left them as though it was their fault. The journey to Schitt’s Creek had certainly been a numb one.

Nowadays, he wondered how he ever did anything _but_ feel. He wondered how the streets of his new home weren’t spilling over with the flood of it. He had cried more in the past four months than he ever had in his entire life from the sheer overwhelm and the gratitude and the love of it. The sheer _David_ of it.

5:20pm

**David Rose**

what the f&@* *** @6&8@ is taking u so long

wait you remember how to get to the motel, right?

patrickkkkkkk

**Patrick Brewer**

Five minutes!!! Jeez

Patrick’s hands stopped drumming on the chair. Oh he remembered, alright.

5\. The Next Day in Rose Apothecary

4.51am

**Patrick Brewer**

Take the day off if you need. I’ll cover the store

**David Rose**

I was going to.

**Patrick Brewer**

Can we talk later?

**David Rose**

I don’t know.

Gonna turn my phone off for a bit.

**Patrick Brewer**

Ok. Take care of yourself.

9.01am

i’m sorry

Patrick flinched as the message delivered. Why had he bothered? He’d already apologised copiously yesterday, and he _knew_ David had his phone off.

It wasn’t as bad as the other message he’d almost sent.

( **Patrick Brewer**

i love you)

The store was cold when Patrick opened it. Without David, the shiplap shelves and artfully bricked walls looked bitterly like some other young upstart’s enterprise, not at all as though it was full of Patrick’s heart and David’s soul. David’s genius and Patrick’s nerve. His gut wrenched with guilt at the thought of it. As he made his way to the front desk, the short journey like a wade through honey, the events of yesterday evening played backwards at half speed in his mind, picked apart frame by frame as Patrick desperately tried to work out where he’d gone wrong. He had to give his head a shake when the zoetrope of memories reached the age of sixteen.

He wished David were here, but that was impossible. The next best thing was something impartial, non-physical; and then for the first time Patrick wished he believed in God as much as David did, so he could have something to be angry at. Something to blame.

Anything but himself.

The sound of the bell ringing above the door reached his ears a few full seconds after it had happened. As Patrick looked up to see Rachel standing there, he juggled between the new panic that the sight of her provoked and settling back into the comfort that her presence had offered him for the past fifteen years.

‘Hi,’ Patrick said hoarsely.

‘Hi.’

Rachel dithered on the spot, as though she were trying to work out why she was there.

‘It’s just that David…’ Rachel faltered, the name half-spoken and uncomfortable on her tongue. ‘David told me to come back tomorrow – well, today – because you’d have something in stock.’

‘Oh. Sure, um, I think I know what you’re talking about.’ Patrick led himself through the motions of bagging up one of the new pots of face cream and ringing it through the till. He ran her through a discount as well, because it would have taken a good decade before something like that didn’t cross his mind.

There was a moment of silence. Then, Rachel held up a recognisable to-go bag.

‘The café had your favorite.’

By the time the barbecue rolled around yesterday, Patrick had been filled with roughly the same amount of unchecked trepidation as a horror movie side character who gets killed first in their careless investigation. The way everything had come crashing down, the way it had snapped like an overly taut rope inside him, almost felt like a relief when he was staring at the ceiling that night in his bedroom, letting the tears fall into his ears and the crook of his neck. Yes, it was the lowest point of the best relationship of his life so far. Yes, it was the biggest fuckup he’d made to date. But at least they _knew,_ and at least it hadn’t come out in the kind of conversations he hated having. The kind where he would have to own up to things. Apologise.

He knew it was unhealthy. He knew there was something problematic about dealing with personal issues this way, letting them fester until they ate their way out of the woodwork, releasing the mounting pressure. It had happened once with some toxic girlfriend he’d had in between one of his and Rachel’s many breaks. She’d said something so caustic and rude that Patrick couldn’t help crying when he went home that night, but above the offense and embarrassment he felt only relief. Something had always felt wrong with her, but now he had something to back his feelings up with. Something easy. A viable excuse to break things off.

Something about following up those feelings by eating pecan and maple cake cross-legged on the storeroom floor with Rachel felt inexplicably right.

‘It doesn’t taste like your mom’s, though,’ Patrick said quietly, between bites.

The corners of Rachel’s mouth turned up. ‘She was asking about you the other day.’

‘Is that why you came?’

‘No,’ Rachel said. ‘I was…honestly, I don’t know. I should never have come.’

Patrick shook his head. ‘I think you should have.’ _There it is again. It gave you another damn excuse. When will you start making things happen, instead of letting them happen to you?_

Looking up, Patrick could see that Rachel sensed something was off in him. Their intuition was spooky sometimes.

‘How long has it been?’ Rachel said, in an attempt to change the subject. He knew exactly what she was talking about.

‘Four months.’ Patrick shrugged. ‘It doesn’t feel like four months. It feels shorter and longer at the same time. It’s like it was only yesterday when I had my first meeting with him. He called me impatient,’ Patrick remembered, laughing despite himself. ‘But then it feels like it’s been years. Like I can’t remember not knowing him. And he had the strangest clothes I’d ever seen. I’ve never seen sweaters like that before –’

Rachel was staring at him. Patrick’s gut clenched on instinct. _Oh, shit._ He’d just been rambling about David to her. The worst possible person he could have chosen to ramble about David to, and here he was, letting his stupid heart bleed out all over his stupid tongue when he should be –

Wait. Was that…amusement? Maybe even a touch of fondness. That recognisable fond stare that Patrick used to rely on. The look that used to confirm, for him, that Rachel still loved him just as much as ever, so he could let down his guard and let her do enough loving for the both of them. He felt so terrible for it in hindsight.

‘You’re in love with him, aren’t you?’ Rachel said quietly.

Silence. Patrick took a small bite of cake to delay his response, but against his will he nodded anyway.

‘Yes. Yes, I am.’

‘Does he know?’

 _Damn it._ Even hearing ‘he’, even the barest mention of David, made Patrick’s throat feel full of barbed wire.

‘What would be the point now? I don’t even know if we’re together anymore.’

Rachel shuffled across her paper plate to join Patrick’s side and slotted next to him, as easily as she always had. Patrick took her hand instinctively. It was strange being the bigger one again.

‘I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry for everything. I can’t help it. I love him. It’s not fair how much I love him. It makes me ache, all of it. I know there are a million different ways I could have done this. _Should_ have done this.’

‘It’s done,’ Rachel said, with no bitterness in it. ‘And it might hurt, but how would I know what healing was if I didn’t know hurt? I don’t feel like I can blame you for any of it anymore now that I know.’

‘But you _can,_ though, Rachel! I’ve treated you horribly! It’s fine if, if, I don't know, deep down you still wish things could go back to the way they were, if you wish I – I could _change_ or something –’

Rachel shook her head, taking both of Patrick’s hands firmly. They’d dislodged from hers in his venting and were flying somewhere above his head. ‘No. Don’t say that. There’s nothing to change. It would be no use. You can’t change someone by loving them harder.’

Of everything that had been said, that was the one that set the tears off. It wasn’t something he’d ever let himself do in front of Rachel before. He was Patrick Brewer; the one whose name she would take, the future husband and dad, the designated driver, the minor league MVP. Perhaps he was used to being comforted now, to sitting in someone’s lap in the cooling, ink-black air of the night and telling them how frightened you were. Or perhaps he simply knew now what a relationship should be, no matter who it was between. And Rachel was someone, he decided, who deserved to see his tears. He'd seen plenty of hers, and it felt like a slap on the wrist from the God he didn't believe in that Rachel was regurgitating the rhetoric of her own self-growth back to him. He wondered who had said that little piece to her in the past four months, or how many had at any point in the past fifteen years. He wondered how often she had said it to herself. And it felt wrong, really, drawing solace back from the person he'd hurt and changed the most. But for the first time, he was willing to sit with the discomfort of that.

He was neither sure how long they'd sat there nor when she'd started crying too, but when Patrick came back to reality his watch was beeping and his sleeve was wet. He played Rachel’s words over and over in his head, realising there was something cathartic and hopeful about the simultaneous pain and relief coursing through his blood as they huddled in silence on the breakroom floor. Knowing there was pain to come meant that he and David weren’t finished. For the first time in his life, he wouldn’t run away when the going got rough.

‘Hey, Rachel?’

She looked up. ‘Yeah?’

‘What time do you check out? I could use an extra pair of hands today.’

Rachel smiled. ‘I’d like that.’

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos and comments do a happy writer make.


End file.
